For The Record: How NYC’s Late ‘70s Culture Changed Music

Hip-hop dominates popular music today, but it wouldn’t exist without the late 1970s and early 1980s environment in New York City that gave birth to the genre. On the latest episode of For the Record, Genius' Head of Artist Relations Rob Markman is joined by hip-hop pioneer D.M.C. of the seminal rap group Run-D.M.C., New York Magazine’s music critic Craig Jenkins, and Anwan Glover, who plays Leon on HBO’s The Deuce. During their discussion, the panel addressed how the socio economic climate of the time period influenced the music that was being created at the time, just like it’s captured on The Deuce.

Jenkins explains how the harsh times in New York streets spawned the birth of hip-hop. “It’s kids uptown, nothing to do, no infrastructure. Bombed-out city. So, they’re out on the streets,” he says. “They found that they could rap, and they found that they could get together and make cyphers. And they found that they could jack power and get into the sound systems and stuff. Basically, it’s just like inner-city entrepreneurialism. Kids figuring out to make a way for themselves and that’s the birth of the thing.”

“If you listen to [Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s song] ‘The Message,’ it wasn’t just about hip-hop. ‘The Message’ spoke on what the adults, our mothers, our fathers, and aunts and uncles were feeling,” D.M.C. adds. “The intro to that song, even though it came from us when we were young beat boys, we were trying to speak for our parents, all these young people, we were looking at our mothers, we were looking at single parent households. We were looking at the teachers struggling, the educational system. And then we sitting around and we looking like, ‘Yo, man. The religious people and the politicians ain’t nearly telling the truth.’”

Glover weighs in with his similar experience living in D.C. during the time period. “It’s like DMC said, Studio 54, you had the Lincoln Theater, Ben’s Chili Bowl. You had the break dancers. You had Chuck Brown, Sugar Bear with E.U.,” he says. “They did the thing with Do The Right Thing with Spike Lee. It was a go-go swing, with hip-hop. Also, Junkyard was signed to Def Jam with D.M.C., so they was doing the Tougher Than Leather thing. And we were kids, we were coming up. It was just this big thing with hip-hop.”